By Andrew Korybko
“Something’s rotten in the state of Pakistan”, and it’s that the country’s institutions have been captured by American proxies through a post-modern coup, after which they began aggressively waging “lawfare” on all their critics.
To paraphrase Shakespeare’s famous line from Hamlet, “something is rotten in the state of Pakistan” when criticizing Chief Of Army Staff (COAS) Qamar Javed Bajwa is equivalent to “inciting mutiny” while wanting to hang former Prime Minister Imran Khan is supposedly just “free speech”. PTI Senator Azam Swati was arrested on Thursday for sarcastically tweeting his congratulations to COAS Bajwa after the acquittal of incumbent Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif – who replaced his predecessor after a US-orchestrated post-modern coup – and his son Hamza in a money laundering case, which the First Information Report (FIR) registered by the Federal Investigation Agency’s Cyber Crime Reporting Centre claimed was intended to incite mutiny, among other charges.
By contrast, Interior Minister Rana Sanaullah has yet to have charges filed against him at the time of this article’s publication despite threatening former Prime Minister Khan that “We will hang him upside down” if he commences his promised Absolute Freedom March on the capital of Islamabad and PTI demanding that the Pakistan Electronic Media Regulatory Agency (PEMRA) take action. Quite clearly, criticizing COAS – who many regard as personally responsible for the US-orchestrated post-modern coup against the former premier as punishment for his independent foreign policy (and especially its Russian dimension) – runs the risk of criminal charges while threatening to publicly execute the country’s former leader can be done with impunity, at least if the one doing so is a top security official.
As could be expected, America almost certainly won’t criticize its newly restored vassal since it tacitly approves of these undemocratic double standards that are implemented out of desperation to prevent a peaceful people’s revolution against its local puppets. It also plans to exploit the emerging regional processes that were unleashed by its latest regime change there to complete the grand strategic reorientation of South Asia, though there’s also speculation that it might be considering the possibility of former Prime Minister Khan returning to office, hence why he and the US have reportedly entered into some sort of contact with each other. It remains to be seen whether anything tangible will come from those reports, but they’re still intriguing to consider.
In any case and however it happens, “The Power Of The Pakistani People Will Defeat Their Unpopular Imported Government” sooner or later, but it would of course be best if the then-former coup regime doesn’t fully discredit the country beforehand. After all, it’s already exploited anti-terrorist legislation to previously charge the former premier for related crimes after he publicly announced his intention to file court cases against the ruling authorities over their allegedly inhumane treatment of his chief advisor. Now, the entire world sees that even serving Senators can’t publicly criticize COAS without fear of being punished on similar trump-up pretexts while the Interior Minister can threaten to publicly execute former Prime Minister Khan without getting in trouble (at least at the time of this article’s publication).
Returning back to the famous passage that was referenced in the introduction, “something’s rotten in the state of Pakistan”, and it’s that the country’s institutions have been captured by American proxies through a post-modern coup, after which they began aggressively waging “lawfare” on all their critics. They’re not just making an example out of Senator Swati, but are inadvertently suggesting that average Pakistanis are also persecuted for expressing similar “politically incorrect” opinions, though their trials and tribulations obviously don’t get any media coverage because they’re not public figures like he is. Likewise, just like Sanarullah threatened to publicly execute the former premier for related reasons, it can’t be discounted that he won’t order the security services to execute average folks too.
With these observations in mind, it should be abundantly clear that the latest example of undemocratic double standards in Pakistan is actually the worst such instance yet. Those watching everything play out from afar should shudder to think what life is like for those average Pakistanis who are displeased with their US-installed post-modern coup regime. They risk imprisonment or worse just like Swati and former Prime Minister Khan respectively if they publicly express similar dissent, though few would probably ever learn of their persecution considering the fact that they aren’t public figures like those two. Nevertheless, those abroad who truly support democracy, free speech, and human rights should raise their voices on those people’s behalf in order to inform the world about what’s happening in Pakistan.
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Andrew Korybko is an American Moscow-based political analyst specializing in the relationship between the US strategy in Afro-Eurasia, China’s One Belt One Road global vision of New Silk Road connectivity, and Hybrid Warfare.
17 October 2022
Source: www.globalresearch.ca